India Slides From 140th to 150th in World Press Freedom Index; Government Notes That Index Is Compiled by People Who Have Not Consulted India

Reporters Without Borders Rankings Decline Over 12 Years; Ministry Responds That Rankings Reflect Bias; Rankings Continue to Decline

Bohiney.com | The London Prat

NEW DELHI, India – India has declined from 140th to 150th in the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders over the twelve years since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, a trajectory that the organization attributes to the concentration of media ownership, government pressure on independent outlets, and the expanding use of content takedown mechanisms that allow authorities to remove critical content within three hours of a request to social media platforms. The Indian government attributes the decline to the fact that Reporters Without Borders is a foreign organization with a methodology that does not fully account for India’s specific context, which is the standard response of governments to rankings they find unfavorable and which does not typically reverse the trajectory.

The 150th position in an index of 180 countries places India below several countries that most assessments would consider to have significantly less robust civil society and constitutional infrastructure, which is the specific awkwardness of a country that has a First Amendment equivalent in Article 19(1)(a), a functioning supreme court, an active opposition, and an independent election commission, but that is nonetheless using its social media content law to block satirical posts about the Prime Minister in the middle of the night. The contradiction between the constitutional infrastructure and the operational reality is the story that press freedom organizations are documenting and that the government is contesting, while independent journalists, cartoonists, and comedians are the people who are actually experiencing the gap between the two.

Godi Media: The Other Side

‘Godi media,’ the popular Hindi portmanteau describing broadcast outlets seen as uncritically aligned with the Modi government – ‘godi’ meaning ‘lap,’ as in journalism conducted from the lap of power – has become a defining feature of India’s media landscape, according to analysts who study it and the audiences who watch it. The phenomenon is not unique to India; most democracies have partisan media ecosystems, and the United States has been having its own version of this conversation for several decades. What distinguishes the Indian situation is the concentration of media ownership among a small number of individuals and conglomerates with overlapping business interests in government contracts, regulatory decisions, and political access, creating structural conflicts of interest that affect editorial decisions without requiring anyone to be explicitly told what to say.

Major television networks in India have adopted coverage frameworks that independent analysts describe as systematically favorable to the ruling party, a characterization the networks dispute. The government has used advertising revenue as a tool of media management through the allocation of state advertising to favorable outlets and away from critical ones, which is legal, effective, and not unique to India but that has measurable effects on editorial independence in a market where state advertising represents a significant revenue stream for many publications. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented cases of journalists facing legal harassment through criminal defamation cases, sedition charges, and the use of financial regulations against media outlets that have published critical coverage, a pattern that creates a chilling effect on investigative journalism even when individual cases do not result in prosecution.

What Is Still Working

India’s press freedom situation is not uniformly bleak, and the accurate picture requires acknowledging what is still functioning. Independent digital news organizations including The Wire, Scroll, and The Print produce investigative journalism that would not exist in a fully captured media environment. The Supreme Court has intervened in press freedom cases on multiple occasions in ways that constrained government overreach. Opposition politicians have platforms and use them. Academic and civil society organizations continue to produce critical analysis. And, as the satirist Prateek Sharma demonstrated by taking his account blocking to the Delhi High Court and winning reinstatement, the legal system retains enough independence to provide meaningful redress in individual cases even as the systemic trend moves in a concerning direction. The situation is best described as contested rather than resolved, which is the condition of press freedom in most large democracies, and which in India’s case is being contested with particular vigor by both sides in 2026.

The broader free speech situation in India in 2026 is best understood as a contested space rather than a closed one. The tools of censorship are being used more aggressively than at any point in the post-emergency period. The courts are providing meaningful, if slow, protection in individual cases. Independent journalists continue to produce critical work through digital platforms that are harder to shut down than the broadcast networks that Godi media has come to dominate. The opposition is fragmented but present. Civil society organizations are active and resourceful. The satirists are still writing the jokes, uploading the videos, and challenging their account blocks in the Delhi High Court. The situation is deteriorating by the metrics that press freedom organizations use to measure it. It is not beyond recovery. The 150th ranking is not a destination; it is a current position on a trajectory that both directions of the political wind could affect. Which direction it goes will be determined by the courts, the elections, and the persistent, irreducible tendency of humor to survive what earnestness cannot.

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